Thank you. Good morning everyone. First of all, I thank the Magnificent Rector, the entire faculty, the professors, the students, the politicians present, and all the other people who came to listen to all the interventions of this extremely interesting day. I would like to try to add to the conclusion of this day to tell a bit about my story, the story of a boy who is in love with the University of Genoa, who had incredible luck in finding professors who supported and guided him during his educational path. I believe Professor Marina Ribaudo is in the room, another person I remember with great affection. Unfortunately, another person who is no longer with us is Professor Giuseppe Ciaccio, a person who had taken me a bit under his wing and had shared his parallel computing laboratory with me. I remember the Department of Computer Science with great affection. On the fifth floor, there was a coffee machine where I met my wife, and then we got married in Genoa. For me, the fifth floor, the entire department, the Valetta Puggia canteen... the first meal, the first lunch invitation with my wife was at the Valetta Puggia canteen, for €4.50, because that's what you could offer as a good Ligurian. And from there, thanks to the teachings and the capabilities of the faculty, Professor Rosolini, a logic professor, and many others I remember, I first managed to become a researcher, to obtain a research grant to collaborate on a couple of projects the University of Genoa was working on. And then subsequently, I found my path. I found my path which, unfortunately, sees little of Italy, but much more of an international profile, mainly in emerging markets, developing countries. Today I want to tell you what Tether is. You read a lot in the newspapers about our company, but I would like, without boring you too much, to explain how the idea was born, what we are trying to do, and the importance of understanding what is behind the company and understanding what the messages and manifestos of the companies that surround us and are developing the finance and technology of the future are. I titled this presentation 'The Quest for a Stable Society', so the adventure, the search for a stable society. As a computer scientist, a lover of mathematics, but also a lover of science fiction, I always start, I started telling the story of Tether from my favorite author, Isaac Asimov. In 1956, he wrote a short story, which I suggest everyone read, called 'The Last Question'. It's a 15-page story that, in my opinion, encompasses so much between science, religion, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and history. The story of a humanity that, from the 1950s, every 100 years, every 1,000 years, every 10,000 years, every million years, every billion years, projects itself into the future. Like any good science fiction book, it tells of a fundamental question that humanity continues to ask this increasingly powerful, increasingly intelligent machine. This artificial intelligence, which over decades, hundreds of years, billions of years, is improved. There is only one question that humanity asks this artificial intelligence. This question is: how can we reduce or stop entropy in the universe? That is, how can we prevent the universe from dying? Fundamentally, how can we create a stable universe? And we at Tether have done the reverse engineering of what this last question means, this concept of stopping entropy on Earth. And the concept of working, creating technology was born, because through technology, so much can be done, people can be connected. How can we create a stable society? Not society in the sense of Tether, but a stable community. Stability right now is seen in all the newspapers every day; it doesn't exist. But as a good geek, a good hacker, I think it can be maintained through technology, but it can only be maintained if technology is accessible to everyone, if finance is accessible to everyone. So, a bit like the Hacker's Manifesto, I wrote this small manifesto that represents a bit of Tether. Stability derives from equal access to technology and finance. Decentralization of technology and finance makes society resilient to failure and abuse. That is, if there is centralization of technology and finance, it is much easier to have abuse, to have despotic control. Technology and finance are a reflection of a peer-to-peer society, that is, person to person. Over the last 5,000 years, society, humanity has grown by talking, meeting in the streets, in the squares, having direct contact. The same for information, words, and discussions, which were person to person. Finance in the same way. We had gold and silver coins and we exchanged them directly without any intermediary. Over the last 50 years, technology and finance have been intermediated excessively, and this is a problem. When we have a society that for 5,000 years is based on social interaction and this is removed within 50 years, it represents an unprecedented uncertainty for the stability of society. At Tether, we have identified four pillars for the concept of creating a stable society: stable finance, stable communications, stable energy, and stable artificial intelligence. Especially the last point is important for me. Today, to link back to the first point we will discuss, there are 4 billion people in the world who do not have access to basic financial systems. We are not talking about online trading and these things, but basic financial systems. Half of the world's population, and perhaps more, does not have a bank account. Not because they are bad people, but simply because they are not profitable enough to be of interest to the banking world. This is a problem; it makes society unstable. But if, in addition to this problem of instability due to the lack of accessibility of the financial world, we add a problem that I think will be even bigger: the same people who will not have access to basic financial systems will not have access to the new artificial intelligence system. That is, the gap we have today due to the lack of accessibility of the financial world will be multiplied a hundredfold due to artificial intelligence, which will be inaccessible in Africa, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia, where we mainly work. Therefore, as Tether, we have set ourselves the goal of creating technology to solve these four problems. I start with an evidence. What is the first template Tether created for this concept of financial stability? The product is called USDT. It's a digital dollar, it uses the blockchain, you may have heard of it, it's simply a digital dollar. Today it has had great success in emerging markets, we will see some statistics. The reason is very simple, you see it from these lines. The first line, the horizontal one, is the value of the US dollar. Let's assume it remains constant over time. In the last 5 years, the Turkish lira has lost more than 80% of its value against the US dollar. The Venezuelan bolivar has lost 98-99.8% of its value against the US dollar, and the Argentine peso 94%. Let's imagine being a father, a mother of a family in Argentina. You work from January to December and at the end of the year, you work hard, excuse the term, and at the end of the year, you are poorer than at the beginning of the year. You won't be able to send your children to school, especially abroad, you won't be able to give them an education or tools that are on par with those available in the richer world, simply because all these, even digital tools, are priced in dollars. If the local currency devalues against the dollar, the entire economy of these countries is paralyzed. Tether has created a digital dollar that moves at the speed of light, which destroys the barriers imposed by traditional finance. Today, this is the basic concept of Tether. USDT is our digital dollar, it's worth one dollar, so when we say we have created a digital dollar, we are saying we have created a virtual currency that is tied to the value of the real dollar. This digital dollar moves, as I said, cross-border. It is used in many occasions. One of the main ones, which we will see shortly, is the remittance system. The company was born in 2014, I started working in 2009 at the University of Genoa. It started from the idea of my partner Giancarlo De Vasini, a person of incredible intelligence, and together in the early years we tried to explain the importance and value of this first technology. It was a bit difficult, I must say, as usual. Sometimes, you know, in startups, you try, you explain, you go around, but at a certain point, something happened. Here we will remember it well, it's March 2020, the pandemic arrived. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of fathers and mothers of families living in emerging markets. If you remember the graph I showed you before, if you are a father or mother in Argentina, for the last 50 years, because the country has had more than four economic defaults in the last 50 years, you go out on the street every week and buy paper dollars and put them under the mattress. This is the life of people living in emerging markets for the last 50 years. They have always gone out, bought the dollar, exchanged it for the local currency, and put it under the mattress. Why? To protect the family, to try to have at least a little nest egg for the children. The pandemic arrives, what can't you do anymore? You can no longer go out on the street. The economies of emerging markets collapse even faster than the economies of richer countries. These families are in total panic. The children of these families teach and explain to their parents at that moment that they know the existence of a digital dollar because they have used it, they have known it in the world of cryptocurrencies, in the world of online gaming, in the world of social networks. And the parents, initially a bit skeptical, start using it, start using it, and within a few months, the market capitalization, that is, how much I had in the bank, was about a couple of billion dollars and reached more than 60 billion dollars within a few months. The demand for this digital dollar exploded. Today we have about 184 billion of these digital dollars in circulation. We are the digital dollar, if not the dollar, used on the most widespread payment systems in the world. This is the growth of our user base, which is a growth that is almost unbelievable. Usually, when you see growth charts of companies, they are logarithmic, they start very fast but then level off. This is a graph that demonstrates how word of mouth, how the necessity, the access that Tether provides with USDT to basic financial systems is unprecedented. This is more similar to the growth chart of Facebook, to give an example, of a social network, than to a chart of a payment tool. But as I said, there are 3 billion people in the world, or rather almost 4 billion people, who do not have access to basic payment systems. Today Tether covers 566 million of them, and we are growing at a rate of 34 million people per quarter. This leads us to say two things. Tether, in my opinion, you may have a different opinion. In my opinion, Tether is the company or the story of success, of financial inclusion, more important in the history of humanity. There is no company that has managed to bring payment systems, access to savings systems, but we are talking about savings for people who earn $3 or $4 a day. We are not talking about... this Tether USDT system is not used by those who live on Wall Street, it is not used by those who already have everything in their life, it is used by those who for the first time in their life find themselves in a position to interact with the rest of the world. In fact, I believe that USDT, or in general a programmable monetary system, which is what USDT has created, is almost a social network. As I said, over the last 5,000 years, people have used gold, silver, or bronze coins as a social tool for social interaction. And we have simply brought this back to people who have not had this opportunity, especially in the last 50 years. These are some newspaper headlines. We see in countries like Argentina, Lebanon, Nigeria, many people, these are very important newspapers, have reported this news in recent years because it is truly revolutionizing the way these people protect their well-being, however little it may be. Another... here is a very long list of uses of USDT. One of the main ones that I like a lot is remittances. Remittances, to understand, are the transfer of money that a girl, a boy who maybe works, say, in Italy, and the family in Georgia, Albania, Nigeria, makes to send money home. We have many people who live in Italy, in Europe, in countries with greater well-being, who work and are far from their families and send money home. This is called a remittance. It's about $900 billion a year in remittances, the volume of remittances. Before the existence of USDT, the companies that handled remittances charged from 6% to 26% for the transfer of money. Think about it, you already live and work far from your family, far from your children, and for one day a week you have to work for the company that handles your remittances. With USDT, it costs zero, there is no transaction cost simply because technology has allowed this change, and this change is being adopted at the speed of light. Given the lesson we learned with USDT, we thought, but only financial access and inclusion is not enough, much more is needed. A communication system that is not controlled by three or four big tech companies is needed. A decentralized energy system is needed, and an artificial intelligence system that is accessible to everyone is needed. This is a graph, I apologize, but it's for a bit more geeky nerds like me, but it tells a bit of what we have done at a technological level. We started from what we call H-Punch. For the more technical, if you remember the BitTorrent protocol, which I studied at the University of Genoa in the networks course and then deepened with various researchers. It's a distributed file-sharing system. We took this technology 10 years ago, we rewrote it, perfected it not only to ensure it could be used for file sharing but also to support any type of telecommunications. This is a technology, everything you see is open source, it's free. I believe in free code, in the importance of free information. So there are hundreds of thousands of lines of free code written by us and made public for everyone, so that everyone can use them. And this is the foundation, the foundations of Tether in our company. We created H-Punch, this peer-to-peer communication system without intermediaries, without centralization, a communication system that can resist any type of attack in order to make people, communities, families, cities, and states truly free. There is no magic. BitTorrent created this concept in 2000, in the last 20 years. No one has re-proposed it. We worked on it for 10 years, we published it, and there are many companies that are now building on this technology. We built an open-source wallet, a wallet for digital assets that is open source, so that everyone can create their own wallet and not have to depend on us. I have always wanted to create a company that creates products that can withstand our own death. In my opinion, there is nothing more epic and beautiful than creating something that makes people independent, rather than addicting them to the use of a specific technology. And the last one is perhaps the most complex project we are doing, it's called Kuvac. It's an artificial intelligence system that works directly on users' devices instead of working on the cloud. I think that when there are these 4 billion people who cannot and do not have access to basic payment tools, basic financial tools, we cannot risk, if we want a stable society, leaving them outside the new artificial intelligence movement. So Kuvac has the great challenge of optimizing AI models to make them work directly on the GPU, on the CPU of your phone. When you are in Africa, in remote villages in Africa, or in Central and South America, connectivity is terrible, it's very difficult. And so the only possibility to use these tools, which are fundamental tools because in many villages in Africa there are no schools, and so for the first time with artificial intelligence we can bring basic education to these people, to the children, but if they don't have connectivity, it's not possible. Creating global connectivity in Africa is almost impossible, but we can create a local intelligence system that everyone can have. I am a big fan of a person named Richard Stallman, who is the author of the free code of the GNU system, which is the base system of Linux platforms. He created his organization, his foundation, has created a lot of free code. Artificial intelligence is the most revolutionary technology in the history of humanity. We cannot allow three or four companies to own it. Here I know I am almost out of time. I wanted to tell you very quickly about this to make you understand that even in the world of energy it is possible to do something that I think is revolutionary. We talked about Africa, right? We talk about Africa, how we should improve access to energy in Africa. Without energy, you cannot have access to digitalization. Today, without energy, it is impossible to turn on a phone and therefore have access to information, to education. Africa is perhaps the most complex continent to try to change things, and we tried with a project. This project involves the realization that it is impossible, at least in our opinion, to bring centralized energy or centralized energy production to Africa, or it is impossible to think of having three or four nuclear power plants in Africa and then very long distribution lines within Africa. It is mathematically and physically impossible. So what do we do? We have selected 1,000 villages in Africa. We have created in each of these villages a kiosk. The kiosk you see here has solar panels on top and rechargeable batteries of 145 Wh. Inside there are about 1,000-1,300 batteries per kiosk. The people of the village can go to the kiosk, they can take a rechargeable battery, take it home, they can recharge it four times a month, when it's finished they bring it back to the kiosk and take another one. To date, we have 1,000 kiosks in Africa and 1 million subscribers to the program. And it is one of the experiments, let me use the term, it's a bit intentional, perhaps experiment in this case, but one of the most important and least known energy revolution experiments in the world. We know that it costs about $5,000-6,000 to make each of these kiosks. Inside each of these kiosks, there are girls who explain to people how the program works, how to interact with the battery. The battery is a smart battery, so you can also connect your phone to check the charge, all these things. So we are giving jobs to 5,000-6,000 people who today may not seem like many, but now that we have discovered that all this works, so 1,000 kiosks, 1 million subscribers, we have budgeted within our company to scale this effort to 100,000 kiosks by 2030-2032, which means that about 30 million homes in Africa will have access to stable energy. This means 150 million people, because about five people per home, will have access to stable energy for the first time. This, by the way, if you look at Africa at night, Central Africa especially, is dark. This change, this single change in 5, 6, 7 years could bring Africa, all of Africa, and even Central Africa to be illuminated and visible, illuminated at night from space. I thank you for your time, it has been an honor. See you soon.
